@LeizylM 

I may look at that for the credit card, was not as worried as I believe I really just need to go in and do a reconciliation on each individual card, but I will look into this.

My real question about setting up a clearing account (non-real bank account) was for working to clear the journal entries related to loans that were paid off (not sure why they are still in the file as showing owed), but the journal entires were created during a cleanup process, so I can directly modify them.  See my original post and comments.